A School Year Like No Other
UCLA witnessed the most violence of any campus. Here's what happened, and the implications
This past weekend, commencement for the Class of 2024 brought an end to one of the most tumultuous terms in UCLA’s history. There is more to unpack than I could cover in a single post, but I wanted to highlight the appalling acts that put UCLA in a class of its own amongst the embattled campuses nationwide. While some may be familiar with these events, I have been genuinely embarrassed at the relative ignorance in the Jewish community (nationally) regarding events at UCLA. These events should have become an inescapable inflection point for every Jew in America.1
On the night of April 30/May 1, over 100 pro-Israel assailants brutally attacked UCLA’s pro-Palestinian encampment for over three hours. While I have fundamental disagreements with some of the messages heard from the encampments, nothing they said or did excuses the mob violence against them. One of my students was held down by three men as they punched and kicked him. Pictures of him, beaten and bloody, circulated on social media by sunrise the next day. Another student of mine went searching for the wounded one at local hospitals; at least 25 victims of the attack were hospitalized. Masked assailants threw fireworks into the encampment; they hit people with bats and mercilessly sprayed students in the face with bear mace. Earlier, they released rats and shouted racial epithets. Staff from the student paper, The Daily Bruin, were also attacked, including an editor who was “repeatedly punched in the upper chest and abdomen” even though her assailants, she said, “knew that we were journalists.”
During the attack, my wounded student called 911, but he was told there were no officers available. A phalanx of empty police cars sat parked mere yards away from the mayhem. The day before, I couldn’t enter my office building without crossing at least ten private security personnel that UCLA had hired; the campus was blanketed with them. But that night, they did nothing. UCLA-PD pulled back their own officers, and despite immediate calls for help, it took three hours for California Highway Patrol and LAPD officers to restore order — though without arresting a single suspect!
A day later, police in riot gear swept through the campus, arresting over 200 and dismantling the encampment. The following Monday, when pro-Palestinian students gathered to prepare for a non-violent sit-in, UCLA students were again removed from campus in zip ties on a prison bus, while the violent assailants from the previous attack still walked free (to my knowledge, only one of them has been arrested). I can only compare the feeling on campus to a somewhat quieter version of the aftermath of a school shooting. My students were afraid to leave their dorm rooms. Students with disabilities had medical flare-ups from acute panic. These reactions were shared widely, irrespective of one’s relationship to the encampment. To most, the campus became a place where authorities could not be trusted to impartially prevent physical harm. The imbalance in the treatment – violent police intervention for non-violent protesters, inaction in the face of felonious assault – closed minds and hardened hearts. UCLA’s double standard reinforced a climate of antagonism, intolerant alarm, and even dehumanization.
As all this unfolded, my Jewish students reached out to me from a place of raw pain. Some of them had been profiled, harassed, and villainized by the encampment – not for their positions on Israel, but merely as a result of their identity. Their voices were a dissonant note amidst growing solidarity between faculty and pro-Palestinian students. Many of my colleagues took a moral shortcut, erasing Jewish (not even Zionist) perspectives in order to defend their students from assault and arrest — and shield them from critique. Once again, the ethical demands of the moment pulled in too many directions. With the school deploying force against a community that was already the victim of vicious violence, it was hard to find voices interested in holding the encampment responsible for offensive rhetoric. There were a few documented cases of verbal harassment against Jewish students, but they varied considerably depending which individuals, amongst hundreds of students and non-students in the encampment, one had encountered.
Unfortunately, by demonizing the entire encampment, mainstream Jewish organizations threw fuel on the fire both before and after the attack. Two days before the rampage, the LA Jewish Federation co-sponsored a pro-Israel counterdemonstration that was staged directly across from the encampment, leading to provocative showdowns, pushing, and even punches thrown between the two sides. Jewish faculty (who, if it matters, are deeply involved in Israel) attempted to stand between the two groups. One of them, my mentor David Myers, wrote that “Over the course of our hours on the front lines, I estimate that more than 90% of the verbal and physical instigation came from the agitated counterdemonstrators, a fair number of whom spoke Hebrew and appeared to come from outside campus.”
UCLA’s campus has many locations that could have been ideal for the pro-Israel rally. To pitch it literally on top of the encampment, with a jumbotron2 and megaphones blasting at the pro-Palestinian students, served as something of a “dress rehearsal” for the violent attack days later. Afterward, I hoped my community would so some soul searching. UCLA Hillel rightfully put out a statement saying “We cannot have a clearer ask for the off-campus Jewish community: stay off our campus. Do not fund any actions on campus. Do not protest on campus. Your actions are harming Jewish students."
But the Federation’s first email after the attack read “We are relieved that the illegal encampments at UCLA’s campus have been removed”, shifting the blame for mob violence onto its victims. A one-sentence perfunctory condemnation was sandwiched between eight paragraphs expressing alarm over pro-Palestinian activism. Rather than deflect blame, the Jewish community should have focused its ire on the attackers and repeated what Yitzhak Rabin said of the terrorist Baruch Goldstein: “You are not part of the community of Israel. Sensible Judaism spits you out.”
Since then, things have only deteriorated. The union representing TA’s went on strike, alleging that by arresting (and failing to protect) graduate students – whose rights to speak freely and access the campus are supported by legal precedent – the UC system had broken their contract. The strike enshrined some of the demands of the encampment as their own: amnesty for arrested students and an opt-out option for researchers from “funding sources tied to the military or oppression of Palestinians.” While these seem readily agreeable to me, more incendiary, unofficial demands have ensued from union membership, echoing Students for Justice in Palestine, and calling, among other things, for my position to be abolished. Since the encampment attack, there have also been serious offenses from the pro-Palestinian side:3
· On June 10, UCLA’s Chabad rabbi showed up to livestream a pro-Palestinian protest from his phone. His phone was knocked away, he was repeatedly called a pedophile, and he was told to “Go back to Poland.” This phrase epitomizes the most vile strain of the pro-Palestine movement. From what I’ve observed, this is not a widely-held sentiment, but it is revealing that such baldly racist statements have been heard in multiple locations nationwide.
· Following arrests made at that protest, a firebomb was thrown at a building at UC-Berkeley. The Instagram account for UCLA’s Students for Justice in Palestine account took credit, saying “UC SYSTEM MUST DIVEST FROM ISRAEL OR FACE OUR WRATH OF REVENGE.” 4
· Both SJP and striking UAW workers have adopted chants that are hard to interpret as anything but a call for violence (“There is only one solution! / Intifada Revolution!”) and for a Palestinian ethno-state (“From the river to the sea / Palestine is Arab!”).
The BDS movement, which adheres to non-violence, has criticized some of this rhetoric, only to catch flack from more radical demonstrators. Perhaps that’s why, on campus, one seldom hears condemnations of these affronts from the pro-Palestine crowd. Just as the mainstream Jewish community has been more devoted to bemoaning tacit endorsements of violence than preventing actual violence from our own people. From every angle, evasions and equivocations have replaced leadership. The hallmarks of moral failure emerge in the predictable phrases used to excuse outrageous behavior from one’s own side: “It didn’t happen…” Or: “if it did happen, it was just some bad apples.” Or rationalizing: “If our side did it, then they deserved it.” Or thinking: “If we admit this was wrong, it will dehumanize us and justify their violence against us.”
But in fact, it is their denial that dehumanizes such people – from within. These knee-jerk responses allow for one’s own side to commit any act because afterward, you can just deny it – or pretend the fringes were not inspired by the mainstream of your movement. When your opponent is already held responsible before any violence happens, there can be no accountability on your own side. And there is no morality without accountability. This applies to the attack at UCLA. It applies to the horrors of October 7. It applies to praising Hamas. It applies to defending the mass starvation of Gazans.
Hamas’ brutality on October 7 was meant to create precisely this cycle. They correctly predicted that the Israeli government would launch a war on a scale never before seen, without an exit strategy, clear goals, or moral limits. And in an already polarized and binary world, perhaps they counted on those who support the Palestinian cause to minimize 10/7, excuse it, or even celebrate it. Each side’s actions were meant to create such unspeakable suffering that our very psychological limits would be overwhelmed, shutting down each person’s consciousness. One quickly heard statements betraying an “us or them" view of the situation. "Either we kill them, or they'll kill us..."
We are living in the world dreamed up by Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and Israeli Public Security Minister (and extremist) Itamar Ben-Gvir. They pushed for the situation to conform to their worldview. Twenty years ago, these men were in prison. And now they've imposed their belief systems on the events, so that nearly everyone else on earth is forced to pick one side, justify the unjustifiable, and lose their humanity in the process.
There is no interest in dialogue or solutions. Each side wants total victory: complete surrender from their opponents. And each side is incapable of imagining themselves as anything but victims. Often because they only focus on contexts in which their opponent seems powerful and menacing. Pro-Palestinians look at arms deals, White House statements, Congressional hearings, and college endowments and see the most powerful entities on the planet united in unconditional support of Israel. Jews look to the streets, to vandalized cemeteries and synagogues, to death threats shamelessly shouted on college campuses. They see the youth of the future, and it reminds them of the past.
And even this doesn’t change the fact that for 76 years, the Palestinians have been the losing side in terms of territory, property, life, and limb. Immersed in such unending anguish, it is natural for some to dream of inverting the existing power dynamics. Others will nurture a desire for revenge. None of that fosters much interest in accommodating themselves to the country built on top of their losses. And with the exception of the Jews who already agree with them entirely, there is an unwillingness to understand the Jewish connection to Israel on our terms.
My students – many with families from the region – remained candid about their fears of stigmatization or outright harm on campus. But they did not despair of the opportunity to learn with one another in our class, even as they knew that many of their classmates had diametrically opposing views on Israel and Palestine. I have never been more impressed with a group of students’ openness toward perspectives that challenged their pre-existing views — in both directions. These students showed up for the humanity of all the people whose stories were mirrored in our films and texts. By doing so in this climate, they not only learned the material. They learned to be wise. Their dedication filled me with a powerful hope.
But I lamented that outside the classroom, it felt like there was neither introspection nor humility. There was selective empathy, the kind that refuses to internalize pain from those labeled as opponents. There has been a hands-off approach to hatefulness on each side. We should each be throwing the pyromaniacs out of our respective camps. But instead, the pyromaniacs are in charge, and we follow their lead as they light the world on fire.
We must now gather our strength, gather whatever is left of the people who know that the current path is a glorified version of a suicide pact. I hope tomorrow brings strength to “our people” – the people who acknowledge their own flawed humanity and seek to restore the humanity of the Other.
PS: This was a long post! Hopefully it provides enough to digest for the next few weeks, during which I’ll be traveling on my long-delayed honeymoon. I hope you’ll rejoin me when I return!
If you know what happened that night, you can skip to the paragraph after the bullet points.
Over the next two days, the jumbotron, facing the encampment, played footage of the October 7th attacks — and also Israeli pop songs, among other strange things. I will later write on my own relationship to this footage and the abominable phenomenon of Oct. 7th denialism. But in this context, the jumobtron was the most immoral thing I had seen up to that point on my campus. The sounds of gunfire – of people being murdered – echoed across the entire central quads of campus and poured into surrounding classrooms and offices. Despite opposition from relatives of the victims, to say nothing of other trauma survivors, the jumbotron played all day and night.
On the actual October 7th, I saw and heard much of this footage while watching Israeli news in real time, as I sought to relay live messages to my family who live near the massacres, and were in safe rooms or otherwise without access to televisions. I did not consent to relieve those moments when I came onto campus on April 29th, 2024. I firmly believe that people must choose to consent to view this footage. It is not appropriate for the public sphere. It is a dishonor to the memories of the dead, whose bodies are sacred and should not serve as fodder for trolling.
This is not meant to be an exhaustive survey of offensive incidents nationwide, nor a dedicated inquiry into the difference between “anti-Zionism” and “antisemitism” — two terrible terms that obfuscate more than they clarify. Here I’m focusing really narrowly on the events at UCLA this spring, before zooming out to survey some larger dynamics that bear more discussion at another time.
The writing here is as atrocious as the sentiment. As one of my student’s joked, apparently all the world’s copy-editors are Zionists.